Could Blockchain secure elections and prevent voter fraud at a global scale?

Elections are under threat from malicious actors that alter voter registration databases, infiltrate voting machines, coordinate disinformation campaigns and more. Blockchain technology could help. How?

It’s not only financial transactions that work with blockchain, but any type of data transmission. This kind of system infrastructure is extremely useful for voting because a vote is a small piece of high-value data. Out of necessity, modern voting systems are largely stuck in the last century, and those that want to vote must leave their homes and submit paper ballots to a local authority. Why not bring this process online? Some have tried, but it has proven difficult to put faith in the results due to large gaps in security.

Blockchain can solve the many problems discovered in these early attempts at online voting. A blockchain-based voting application does not concern itself with the security of its internet connection, because any hacker with access to the terminal will not be able to affect other nodes. Voters can effectively submit their vote without revealing their identity or political preferences to the public. Officials can count votes with absolute certainty, knowing that each ID can be attributed to one vote, no fakes can be created, and that tampering is impossible.

Election security vulnerabilities

Identifying vulnerabilities in election hardware and processes is vital to preventing future attacks. For election cybersecurity, the focus is often on hacking voting machines. However, vulnerable machines are only one part of a complex, interconnected system with multiple weak points for bad actors to exploit.

Securing elections requires securing the entire process.

The five most vulnerable parts of the electoral process, outlined by Harvard’s Belfer Center Cybersecurity Project, are:

1. Information warfare: Before an election, the media voters consume helps shape their political opinions. But due to targeted disinformation campaigns, voters can have trouble determining fact-based sources to accurately inform their vote. Digital deceptions distributed in the pre-election stages have a profound effect on election outcomes. Computational propaganda, digitally doctored photos and videos, weaponized social media, and more all can derail the democratic process.
2. Electronic voter registration databases: Attacks on voter registration databases can also threaten people’s ability to vote. Removing sections of voters likely to support one candidate could effectively swing a close election. If a person’s identity has been removed from the voter registration database, they can’t check in at polls. An attack that deletes an entire state’s registration database could delay or even stop an election from taking place altogether.
3. Voting machinery and tabulation systems: From a cybersecurity perspective, every part of the election process that involves some type of electronic device or software (especially if connected to the internet) is vulnerable to hacking. However, security experts agree that internet-connected voting machines, tabulation systems, and their networks are particularly vulnerable.
4. Election reporting systems: Manipulated reporting systems could announce inaccurate voting results. Hackers could also take over an official social media account and disseminate false results directly.
5. Post-election audits: These are vulnerable to inaccuracy without proper voting machinery in place. Experts agree that reliable post-election audits are only possible with a paper trail. This means that voting machines that only record votes electronically (often via touchscreen) are not suitable for ensuring election integrity.

Blockchain is paving the way for a direct democracy, where people can decide the course of policy themselves, rather than rely on representatives to do it for them. While the rules of a political election may have to be changed to make way for such a transparent system, blockchain is also ideal for informing business decisions, guiding general meetings, polling, censuses and more.

The use cases for blockchain voting software are many and diverse. Its ability to engage and manage a constituency is crucial to the future of society, not just to produce a transparent outcome but to encourage all people to participate in their communities. Currently, the technology is still in its infancy, but it matures alongside the young voters it will one day help, and looks to be a key part of our collective future.

Blockchain’s fundamental characteristics — transparency, immutability, and accountability — underscore the technology’s potential for securing elections.

While blockchain’s proponents argue that the technology could increase voter participation and improve security, some cybersecurity and election experts say blockchain makes election processes overly complicated and no more secure than other internet-connected election systems.

Despite this lack of consensus, several pilot projects around the world are starting to lay the foundations for blockchain-based voting.